For the better part of his career, Jake Shears was known for his soaring vocals and iconic image as a member of the multi-platinum selling Scissor Sisters. But after moving to New Orleans and taking some time out of the limelight, he's back this year with a three-pronged entertainment attack: co-starring as Charlie Price in Broadway's Tony-winning "Kinky Boots," getting ready to release a solo album of all new material this summer and publishing a memoir called "Boys Keep Swinging."

It's an appropriately glamorous title for a book that delivers on the sex, drugs and roll and roll front, but if look past the cover, you'll find a candid account of coming out, a bittersweet exploration of grief and depression and an elegy for New York City in the period immediately before and after 9/11. "Right after the towers fell, I thought I was going to get a job doing magazine stuff," Shears told Mary Elizabeth Williams on "Salon Talks."

"My friend Scott [Scissor Sisters' Scott "Babydaddy" Hoffman] and I were writing music and just decided to go perform one night. It was ten days after September 11. We went to the Slipper Room and did a song, a really stupid song. That was the start of our performing. We were just doing it for fun, and ended up writing some pretty good songs."